Thursday, May 31, 2012

I had thought that my previous post would be the last actual post on this blog. But I met with the guy who is working on my new website yesterday and it seems like a few more things have to be fixed before we can go live at the new website. So I'm going to leave you with at least one more thing here. Which is about my upcoming travels.

The map above is the basic route I will be following when I make my journey across these United States. You can click on any of these maps to enlarge them. I will leave Akron on June 15th and arrive in Knoxville later that day where I'll meet up with my dad and my sister. Then my dad and I will head for Dallas a little bit later. Maybe the next day. Maybe two days after. Maybe three. We don't know yet.

Here's where you come in. I have already accepted a speaking gig in Las Cruces, New Mexico (the date has yet to be finalized). It occurred to me that I might be able to fit in a couple other speaking gigs on the way out to California.

In order for me to make it to any venue that might want to have me, the venue would have to be able to schedule the talk for sometime after June 17th and definitely before the first week of July is over. We'd need to coordinate with the people in Las Cruces in case there's any conflict. And you'd have to be somewhere on or at least not too far off the route you see on the map above.

For example, Nashville, Memphis, Little Rock, Tuscon and Phoenix (among many others) are all on the route I'm taking. Atlanta, Chattanooga, Birmingham, Shreveport, Oklahoma City, Austin, and Lubbock (among many others) are not on my route but are not inconceivably far off of it. Omaha is too far. Denver might be do-able, but it's a pretty long way from where I want to be. You get the idea, I hope.

This may not work out at all. The time frame is short. It's really hard to say with these things. But if you're interested in trying, please send me an email at spoozilla@gmail.com.

I'm specifically looking for speaking gigs or one-day retreat type things. I probably can't accept your kind offer to meet up for coffee. I would consider places that might offer me a couch for the night, though we'd have to see if that kind of thing would work out with the schedule and what-not.

***

People in the comments section seem concerned about the new website, especially its comments section. I'm talking to the guy who is doing all the tech stuff about various options. I do like the free-form feel of the current comments section in principle. But in actual practice, it often just gets screwy in there. What I'm hoping to do is have some kind of free-form area of the new site where people can post whatever they like as well as an area where people who actually want to discuss serious stuff can go. I'm not sure if this will be possible or not. That's what most of the discussion last night was about.

Personally, the comments section can get very taxing for me. I don't think a lot of the commenters understand that I am an actual human being just like them. The mean nasty hurtful stuff does actually hurt me sometimes. If I were Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern and I got paid big money to be the target of abuse by strangers, that would be a different matter. Or if I felt there was some way in which my being a punching bag helped the dharma somehow, that would also be different. Or even if I were just a guy who enjoys arguing with people... But I am none of these things. And other people get abused in there as well. It's really sad. So the comments section as it stands now often devolves into a big, depressing energy suck that has no value at all for me. Sorry to say this. But it's the truth.

It's not always that way. In fact sometimes it's really good and stimulating. But as it stands now it's just too prone to running itself into spasms of stupidity. I want to find a way to allow a good, stimulating space for real conversations to happen that I can involve myself in, while simultaneously having another section where people can go nuts. I would probably never even set foot in the go-nuts section .

I started moderating the comments section on the last post and all kinds of people are sending in comments screeching about "censorship" and "the truth." Look, folks. It's just the comments section of a blog. There's nothing in the Constitution guaranteeing you the right to vent in there. Please just try to relax a little. Maybe do some zazen instead. Or if you want a blog to vent on, start your own. It's easy and it's free. No one will stop you. No one will censor you or moderate you.

According to Blogger's statistics, over 52,000 comments have appeared on this blog since it started. Fifty two thousand! My God. That's a lot. A lot of people have used this space as a way to broadcast their opinions. And a lot have abused the privilege. The comments section of this blog is so notorious that Tricycle magazine singled it out in a piece called Dharma Wars about the way Buddhist blogging often gets out of hand. And they were right to do so. Some of what's gone on in the comments section of this blog is really shameful and embarrassing.

I have really done a lot to allow for an open forum. And it has come at a cost to me in headaches and heartaches. So please understand why the new website will be different in this regard.

Monday, May 28, 2012

I just put my Ibanez Ultraman Destroyer guitar up on eBay. The bidding starts at the inconceivably low price of $1500. There were only two (2) of these guitars ever made. I designed it myself for a promotion Tsuburaya Productions teamed up with Ibanez for at the 2005 NAMM show. This is my own personal guitar and it's very important to me. But I'm getting rid of stuff and this is one thing I'm getting rid of.

Go bid on it now. It will be up there for a week. And please, please do not get cheap on me people! This is one of a very small number of things I own that are actually worth something both personally to me and monetarily because of the incredible rarity of the item. Like I said, I designed it. I chose the Ultraman image and the guitar model it would go on, then placed the image where it is, then approved a test version and finally got me a guitar. This is probably my personal favorite image of Ultraman. One reason is because you can actually see a little of the man inside the costume (Bin Furuya) peering out through the mouth of the costume. It looks like maybe Ultraman has a tongue. But that's really Mr. Furuya's chin. It's form the first episode of Ultraman originally broadcast in 1966. The photo used was printed from the original negative from Tsuburaya's archives, not some cheezy JPEG some dude found on the Internet.

I played this quite a bit and recorded with it. But it has never been used on stage. So it's like new, even though it's technically a used instrument.

The money this generates will go to help pay for my upcoming move and for my friend Catie's wedding since Catie has been storing this for a couple of years for me.

The next bit of news I have to announce is that the blog you're reading will soon vanish! But fear not. I've been working with my good friend Jayce for a few months now to design a brand new website that will be far better and more professional looking than this old blog.

I'll have more specifics in the next couple of days. But I thought I'd give you a heads up now. The new website will go live in June and this one will go dead at about the same time.

Friday, May 25, 2012

Last night I reread the previous thing I put up here, "Stuff Part 2." And I realized that what I wrote could be taken two ways. In one sense it's about a guy trying to throw away stuff that he's accumulated in a storage unit. But it could also be taken metaphorically.

I'm kind of dumb that way. When I read the Bhagavad Gita a long time ago, I thought it was a story about God coming down and helping a guy in a battle. Someone had to tell me that the five horses of Krishna's chariot represent the five senses, that Krishna and Arjuna represent the personal self and the more elevated self riding in the same chariot of the body, and so on. I was too dense to get that on my own. Seems I'm the same way with my own writing.

Our personality, our ego, is like a storage unit in which we keep all the things we don't want to let go of. We know that eventually we'll have to let go of everything. But right now we don't. So we keep it. Some of us are very protective of our storage units. We spend a lot of time organizing the stuff inside, reminding ourselves of what's there, defending it against those who might want to steal it, or just defending it against the unavoidable decay that all things undergo. Others of us are less protective of our stuff. But we keep it anyway and we don't really want to let it go anymore than the more protective folks do.

If you realize that you have to let go of the stuff in the storage unit that is your self, and you know you need help to do that, who would be best to call upon? Going back to my own actual concrete and metal storage unit in Durham, NC, I was very lucky to have my friend Catie help me.

Catie understood very clearly what I was going through last weekend. She has her own stuff. She doesn't care much about Ultraman and Godzilla junk. But she's a huge fan of Morrissey. She's even gone so far as traveling to England or far flung parts of the USA just to attend his concerts. The way she tells it, even waiting in line for tickets to see Morrissey is a magical experience for her. She has, in her apartment (the Lady Cave) what she calls her Shrine to Morrissey. In this shrine is a collection of memorabilia collected during those journeys. She may not understand what I see in a kids' TV superhero show from Japan. But she knows what it's like to have stuff that's important to you and that other people can't really understand the significance of. In the more metaphorical process of cleaning out the self, you need that kind of helper.

A lot of people will reject certain teachers because they believe they are flawed and therefore cannot teach them the perfection that they seek. They search, instead, for teachers who they view as pure and untainted. But what they're seeking when they look for that is someone to help them get rid of the stuff in their storage unit who cannot understand why they're keeping stuff in a storage unit at all. I'm not really sure that would be the best kind of help one could ask for.

Besides that, I think these kinds of "perfected teachers" are mostly the stuff of legend. They're mythical creatures much like the Loch Ness Monster. I use Nessie as my example because I, Brad, the guy writing this, truly wants to believe that the Loch Ness Monster is real. I want to believe that there actually is a living plesiosaurus swimming around in a lake in Scotland. Seriously. But I've looked at the evidence and none of it holds up to careful scrutiny. As much as I wish it were true, I have to admit that it's probably not.

The greatest teachers, in my estimation, are those who understand what it's like to have a storage unit of the self. Oh Jesus what a horrible clunky metaphor! But I'm gonna run with it. My teachers, Tim and Nishijima, are not ego-less "perfected masters." They are, in fact, both people with very strong egos and very clear attachments. My troll Gniz was criticizing me recently for not pointing out the flaws in my own teachers. I refrain from doing so because they're also my friends, and you don't go on the Internet and reveal the hidden flaws of your friends. That's not nice. That's also a good way to lose a friendship.

But suffice it to say, they have flaws. It's not that they have no stuff in their storage units that appeals to me and works for me. Rather it's the way they deal with the stuff they've chosen to keep in there. It's very different from the way that most people deal with it. The differences are subtle, so subtle sometimes that most people would miss them completely. But they are deep and profound. These men have discovered a way to both keep that stuff in their storage unit and not keep it at the same time. It's the kind of trick that I would have thought impossible. And I've spent years and years and years with both of them watching very carefully for signs of sleight of hand. But I've come away convinced that what I'm seeing is actually true. And because it's true it cannot be magic. It must be something that I can do too.

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said that, in practicing Zen, you have to clean out your room. He followed up by saying that sometimes you'll bring all the stuff back into the room after you've taken it out. But, he said, you have to take it all out first. I would also add here that most people will end up throwing away a lot of things, but still taking back the most important ones. This is precisely like what you do when clearing out an actual storage unit.

If you threw everything away, you'd also throw away those things that make you most effective in helping others clean out their storage units. You'd throw away the attachment to your stuff that makes you a good sympathizer to someone who needs it.

Understand that this stuff doesn't necessarily need to be actual physical stuff. Some people have no possessions at all, yet still manage to cling very hard to their personal stuff anyhow. Sometimes the very fact that they own nothing becomes a huge thing that they own and are completely unwilling or even unable to get rid of.

Anyway, those are the thoughts on this matter that were swimming around in my head and demanding to be written down when Crum the Cat woke me up this morning. I was unable to go back to sleep, even though I seriously needed to, until I typed them out. And so now here they are for you to enjoy.

And with that, I will begin another day of getting rid of stuff. Yesterday I sold six big boxes of books, DVDs and CDs. Today I'm hoping to cut things down even more. I will not get rid of all of it. Not just yet anyway. But the time will come eventually. Do please consider making a donation to help me move the important stuff
I have to keep. I hate to say that shit and sound like a damned
televangelist. But this move is costing me a god-damned fortune no
matter how much junk I unload and my battered PT Cruiser is going to need some upkeep in order to make it out to the West Coast in one piece.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

So I pared the contents of my storage space down to ten of what the US Postal Service calls "large" Priority Mail boxes. They're really not very large, if you ask me. The dimensions are 12 inches x 12 inches x 5 1/2 inches. Those of you reading in countries where they use the metric system, please do your own conversions. You can't even get record albums in them because the dimensions are just a hair too small.

I was able to do this because of the cooperation of my good friend Catie Braly. I gave her the authority to tell me to get rid of my stuff. I voluntarily submitted to her. And I paid her for this service. I told her that I'd split whatever I made from selling my stuff and give her half. She probably would have done it for free. But I would've felt shitty about that, especially since she's trying to get money together for her upcoming wedding.

Our arrangement resembled what happens when one hires a personal fitness trainer, a martial arts instructor, or when one works with a Zen teacher. You willingly submit to authority in order to do something that you find yourself unable to do alone.

In my case, I had a strong attachments to what was in that storage unit. It wasn't a lot of stuff compared to what most American males my age own. But it was stuff I'd spent years acquiring through long travels and through personal connections. There were things in that storage unit that certain nerdy people would just about kill for. Some of the items I managed to get my hands on while I worked at Tsuburaya Productions were made available exclusively to employees of the company. They trade for handsome amounts of cash among Japanese collectors.

Now I had to get rid of it and there was really no way to sell it to the people who would actually pay what it was worth. Imagine you have a vintage Mercedes in mint condition, it runs great and there's not even a speck of rust anywhere on it. But you're in a land where nobody drives cars or even knows what one is. So you have no choice but to donate it to an elementary school where they're going to gut it and put it out in the playground for the kids to climb all over. You can tell yourself "at least the kids are going to enjoy playing on it" all you want. Even so, you're still gonna feel kind of bad about it.

But, as anyone who's gotten rid of stuff can tell you, it also feels good to dump your junk — even if it's good junk. If I didn't know I would feel better once this stuff was gone, I wouldn't have enlisted Catie's help to get rid of it.

I asked Catie to be ruthless and she was. Whenever I said, "I want to keep this," she would ask why. When I gave my reasons, she'd ask why again. With her help I was able to get rid of a lot of things I probably would otherwise have kept. We established a safe word — "watermelon" — which could be used if I really couldn't let go of some particular thing. I only remember using it once. That was when I found an old issue of Freakbeat magazine containing an interview with me during the days when I was making the Dimentia 13 albums.

In Zen training, you have to accept a certain amount of authority. I know I've been outspoken in the past about questioning authority. And I stand by what I said. But I feel that the real problem is belief in authority. When you hire a personal trainer, or ask a friend to help you get rid of stuff, you don't usually end up believing that your personal trainer or your friend is some kind of almost divine being who knows all and sees all. You view your trainer or your friend as an equal to whom you have provisionally granted a limited degree of power over you, usually in exchange for something.

Zen teaching relationships can also work the same way. You acknowledge that your teacher has some basis for being able to teach you. He's had training and experience. Perhaps he exhibits some kind of personal charm or charisma that attracted you to him in the first place. That's all fine.

But there is always a mutual exchange going on. Your Zen teacher is also learning from you. He isn't learning the same things as you're learning from him, or learning what he learns in quite the same way. But it's not a one way street. It's not some kind of mystical download from on high.

It's important in these relationships to grant the teacher respect. But you should also expect to be respected in return. Each side of the relationship is different, though, and the ways in which respect is shown and help is offered by each side is also different

For example, last weekend I allowed Catie to be a bit short and curt with me. I needed someone to say a short, sharp "No!" to me. It didn't always feel good to hear that. But it was part of the process. If I'd put forth my personal desires things couldn't work out to my own ultimate benefit. So I had to allow someone else the authority to deny me what I thought I wanted.

In Zen teaching and other spiritual relationships, this aspect of mutual respect often breaks down into a kind of worship. I know there are schools of thought that say this sort of worshipful attitude can be used to benefit students. I don't believe that. That always seems like a perversion of what the relationship ought to be, even when such perversions are enshrined by tradition. It's too easy for this to mess up both the students and the teacher. You end up with a teacher who owns a few houses and a couple dozen Lamborghinis but has lost sight of whatever made him a great teacher to begin with and a bunch of students who think the whole point is to purchase gifts for their beloved master.

Actually, the process last weekend was a lot easier than I'd feared it might be. I found it fairly easy to let stuff go. I guess all that zazen pays off sometimes. Even if it feels like you haven't really grasped its lessons, sometimes things happen and you realize you have.

In the end, a little boy named Blixa, the son of Catie's friend Drea ended up with a collection of Japanese monster stuff. Blixa is a big fan of Ultraman, having been turned on to it by his dad. That's him in the Ultraman costume on the photo at the top of this blog. The stuff Blixa got might look like mere toys to the untrained eye. But most of it was not. He ended up with some high ticket collectibles that I sincerely hope he will not bash around as if they were $5 action figures from the local WalMart. But I have no way of controlling what happens to those things anymore. I have to be OK with that. And surprisingly, I am.

Just before I left, Blixa brought over a gift he'd made for me as his exchange for the stuff I gave him. It's a picture he drew of Ultraman's goat. I never even knew Ultraman had a goat!

That drawing is priceless! It's one collector's item I'll be holding on to!

In the comments section someone said:Aside from Baker Roshi... name another zen teacher who lives in opulence from the donations of their students.

It's true that generally speaking Zen is mostly free of masters who live high off the hog from donations. At least in the West.

In
Japan things are different. I found that most of my "normal" (ie, not involved in Buddhism)
friends had no respect at all for Zen masters. The general feeling
seemed to be that Zen masters were lazy rich people, driving around in
fancy cars and working only when necessary to do funerals and other such
ceremonies. They were seen as taking advantage of the poor and
uneducated.

How much of this is actually valid, I do not know.
Some of it surely must be true because the stereotype was quite common
among people I knew over there. The people I knew who held this
stereotype were generally young, educated artistic types. They viewed
Zen masters in much the same way that same segment of the US population
views televangelists.

I was also obliquely referencing others on the spiritual scene who are
not connected with Zen, or who use Zen as just one piece of their
smorgasbord. But I find it's best not get too specific. There's no point
in riling up the followers of some guru by citing him as an example,
especially when the problem is so pervasive. It's not really necessary
to name anyone in particular.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

I'm stuck here at a Days Inn in Wytheville, Virginia after my
alternator belt broke just outside of Bland, Virginia (yes, it's a real
place) on the way down to Durham, North Carolina to clear out a storage
space I rent down there. I'm gonna type a blog post until the repair
shop calls me. Hopefully this will be short!

The reason I
have stuff in storage in Durham is because a couple years ago, I decided
I had to leave Los Angeles. I was paying a lot of rent on an apartment I
wasn't even living in half the year as I traveled around spreading the
Good News of Zen to the people of the world. But I wasn't earning as
much on these trips as I was paying to rent that place. Something had to
give.

I'd heard good things about the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area
and had a few friends there. So I decided I'd move to Chapel Hill. I was
about to leave for two months in Europe. So I packed up everything and
sent it to a storage space in Durham. Then I lived in other people's
houses, apartments, closets and floorspace for nearly a year. At the end
of that year I decided I didn't want to move to Chapel Hill. After a
brief stint in Brooklyn, I ended up living in Akron. But I didn't intend
to stay in Akron for the long haul. So I just left my stuff in Durham.

I used to scoff at people who had storage spaces. If you had so
much stuff that you needed to put some of it in a place where you
couldn't even get to it, then you had too much stuff! And now here I am
having to deal with my own stuff...

There's an idea that a good Buddhist should have no stuff at all.
She should only own one bowl and two robes. She should live off the
good graces of people who respond to her calling to the truth by
supplying her with food and shelter.

That's a nice ideal. Buddha's original group of monks and nuns
were able, it is said, to live like that in Northern India 2500 years
ago. But times have changed. I doubt many people could live like that in
Northern India today let alone anywhere else in the world. I also have
nagging doubts about Buddha's original monks actually having lived that
way even back then. For one thing, to "leave home" in those days meant going a few miles or less away from home. Which meant you could leave your stuff there if you needed to. I'll bet you a case of doughnuts a lot of monks and nuns did just that. Of course, some were probably very strict with themselves about this. I just doubt that all of them were.

There are lots of misconceptions about contemporary Buddhist monks with regards to stuff. For example, one would think that a guy whose nickname was "Homeless Kodo" probably owned nothing but his robes and a change of underwear. In fact, the word yadonashi (宿なし, homeless) that was applied to Kodo Sawaki referred to the fact that he did not have his own home temple like most Zen teachers. He did, in fact, have a home to live in. What's more, his student Kosho Uchiyama complained that as Kodo's attendant he was required to lug mountains of Kodo's books whenever Kodo went out on the road to lead retreats. Homeless Kodo had stuff.

Like Kodo, most of what I own is books. It's probably no shock that most writers are terrible book fanatics. I've got a Kindle and I can see the logic of it. But I'll never get over my affection for actual books on real paper. Which is unfortunate because books take up lots of space and they weigh a ton. They are made of wood!

Every Buddhist monk, male or female, that I've known has owned stuff. Most of them are fairly modest in terms of what "normal" people own. But they all have more than their begging bowls and their robes. Most of them, in fact, suffer from the same book collecting disease as I do. Though most of them have "better" books than me. I have lots more Three Stooges books than any other monk I know.

Stuff is a burden and a responsibility. I wish I had less of it. I understand that my inability to simply get rid of things is a sign of being too attached to them.

But it is much easier to espouse an ideal of living simply than it is to actually throw things away that you put a lot of effort into acquiring. If you've tried it, you'll know exactly what I mean. This weekend I have enlisted the help of my good friend Catie who I have instructed to ignore my pleas when I tell her that I absolutely have to keep certain things. I'm very lucky to have a friend like that. Plus I'm giving her some of my collectibles so she can sell them to pay for her upcoming wedding in exchange for this service.

I always feel unburdened whenever I can get rid of things. And yet, having things is not always bad. It is because some people held on to their stuff and took care of it that we know about our history. My friend Jimi (lead singer of 0DFx) is a pack rat who collects all kinds of stuff related to Northeast Ohio rock and roll history. He'll be exhibiting some of his stuff soon in downtown Akron (I'll have the details when I get them). I'm very grateful for his work. Historians everywhere are grateful for pack rats like Jimi. This includes Buddhist historians. We wouldn't even have some of our most important sutras if it weren't for people who valued their personal stuff and kept it nice. There were times in history where Buddhism was persecuted and most of these precious materials were destroyed. At the time, those who had the few copies left may not have known their real value and may have been inclined to just toss them away and go off wandering. I, for one, am glad they didn't.

Which isn't to say that's the same as me and my Three Stooges books. It's just that to universally condemn the habit of holding on to stuff is a big misunderstanding.

Buddhism is always about doing what is better. It's not about being austere for the sake of being austere as if austerity itself were a virtue in its own right. For some, giving up all possessions, having no job (in the usual sense) and living off the good graces of others is freeing. For some, this would be intolerable. I'm one of the latter. There is too much Midwestern work ethic instilled in me for me to ever be comfortable living that way. So I work in the world and as a consequence of that I have stuff. It's a matter of exchanging one sort of burden for another.

I would not encourage Americans, Canadians and Europeans — or in fact most Asians, Indians, Africans or Inuit — living in the 21st century to try to adopt the ideal lifestyle espoused by the earliest Buddhists. It's too hard to make that sort of thing work anywhere in the world these days. Sure, it was not easy 2500 years ago either. But nowadays it's damn near impossible.

Plus I don't think it really helps others that much. In the society we live in today, it's important for everyone to contribute economically. It's OK to go off on a retreat for a while, maybe even for a few years, to get yourself together and suchlike. But I believe it's also important to be part of the regular world. A retreat is just that. It's a retreat from the world. Sometimes it's necessary and honorable to retreat. But I don't think we should live our entire lives in a state of retreat from the world.

Hey! They just called about my car! Hooray!!!

(The photo I've chosen to illustrate this piece is NOT my stuff, by the way!)

ARMAGEDDON
This video features dancers Cherry, Nina Fukuzato and Zingara Amore. The song was brought to the band by drummer Mickey "X-Nelson" Hurray and subsequently pounded into shape by us. Rumor has it Mick wrote the tune on piano! A first for Zero Defex! The video was shot in Wadsworth, Ohio at their public access cable facility. I slaved over a hot laptop for hours making all the weird psychedelic effects.

ANYMORE
This song was brought to the group by guitarist Jeff "Ghoul" Hardy who also provided the fine insightful lyrics. Vocalist Jimi Imij mostly edited the video although I got it started. But I didn't have the guts to cut it up as much as Jimi did. The beginning and ending are from a one-of-a-kind record Jimi found at a thrift shop. It was recorded at a school in West Virginia sometime in the 1940s.

***

And don't forget to order your copy of Hardcore Zen Strikes Again from Amazon today! Order six! They're low in polyunsaturated fat!

As far as I know it's still in English even if you order it from Amazon in Germany. Thanks to Oliver Wunderlich for providing me the link.

For the moment, the book is available only as an electronic version and is being sold exclusively through Amazon. After 90 days, the ebook will be available from other retailers. There will be a printed version as well. I'm still waiting to see and approve the galleys on that. After the approval is done and it goes on sale, I'll let you know where you can order it. You should also be able to get the print version at stores, but you may have to ask for it. Again, I'll let you know once I know.

The book itself is a collection of articles I wrote for the old Sit Down and Shut Up website that I maintained from 2001 until maybe 2004 or so. These are some of my earliest writings about Zen. They're generally a lot snarkier and more acerbic than my more recent postings. It will be interesting to see how some of the people who like to say, "Brad was so much better before, he sucks now" will feel when they actually see some of that old stuff again.

The book contains such gems as "Zen is Punk," "Zen is Not Punk," "The Whole Vegetarian Thing," "Losing My Religion," "The Source of All Religion," "Explaining the Unexplainable" and many more blasts from the past.

In addition, I have written new introductions and afterwords to each of these pieces (of what?) as well as a new introduction and a new afterword for the book itself. How much more could you possibly want?

Although these pieces have previously appeared on the interwebs, I took them down ages ago. If they're still on line anywhere, I don't know how to find them. (And I really don't need any clever-trousers putting links to them in the comments section. Thank you!) So even if you've read some of this stuff before, it's not likely you've read it in the past eight years. Plus the new intros and afterwords talk about how I feel about what I said all those years ago, and nobody's read those before anywhere.

Saturday, May 12, 2012

I don't even really "get" Twitter. I'm not sure just what you're supposed to do with it. The best stuff I've seen there has been funny one-liners like Shit My Dad Says or my friend Precious Veal. She's a hoot!

A lot of "spiritual" type guys are on Twitter these days throwing out little sound bytes of spirituality. But I doubt there's anything truly worthwhile in the realm of spiritual practice that can be reduced to 140 characters.

Of course, having said that I also have to mention that there is a tradition in Zen of so-called "turning words." These are short phrases that, when heard by just the right person at just the right time, have a profound effect. One such phrase that often gets quoted is, "From birth to death it's just like this." A lot of the koans end with "turning words." For me, hearing the phrase "form is emptiness, emptiness is form" really blew my head right off when I was about 18 years old.

But I seriously doubt that a Twitter feed is the best way to disseminate "turning words." It's not like those ancient Zen guys subscribed to a service that would sling random "turning words" at them from multiple sources of varying quality at a rate of four to six an hour popping up on their cell phones among fart jokes from drive time DJs and news about Paris Hilton's latest Brazilian wax job. It was a different sort of thing altogether.

I've responded to a couple of Deepak's tweets already. But one came up last night that I think really needs to be addressed in detail.

Right at the outset I want to emphasize that this is not about the man Mr. Deepak Chopra himself. It's about what he tweeted. It's not even about everything he tweets. It's about this one specific tweet. I don't know enough about Mr. Chopra to criticize him as a human being or even as a brand. I know he's got a comic book series and a bunch of TV shows and even a video game. As dubious as the spiritual applications of these things seem to me, I'm not even all that fussed about them. If someone wanted to make a graphic novel or a video game out of Hardcore Zen, I'd probably do it. So this isn't about that.

It's about what Mr. Chopra says in his tweet. And what he says is this:

When you reach pure awareness you will have no problems, therefore there will be no need for solutions.

Let's analyze that for a minute.

When (in the future, not now) you (who exist now and will continue to exist in the future) reach (whatever you imagine to be) pure awareness you (who exist now and will continue to exist in the future) will have (in the future) no problems (for your self), therefore there will be (in the future, not now) no need for (you to have) solutions (and won't that be wonderful, over there, past that hill, just out of sight, let me sell you a way to get there).

If it were only Deepak Chopra who believed this, it wouldn't really matter much. But this is how pretty much everyone approaches meditation practice and it's why meditation practice seems to fail those people. It is certainly how I myself thought of practice for a very long time. I wanted something for myself. I might have even thought of what I wanted to get in terms of "pure awareness." I read enough shitty books that used shitty phrases like that.

There is no pure awareness for you.

That might sound harsh. But really it's not. What you are can never enter that place. Because you are the subject that sees things in terms of objects. Joshu Sasaki put it like this in his book Buddha is the Center of Gravity; "The God that is standing in front of you as an object says, 'I am your God.' But he is not. Even if that God has great power, he is not the real God."

Pure awareness, whatever that is, or God (my preferred term), cannot be the object of you, cannot be the possession of you, it isn't in your future, it isn't something you can ever possibly reach. It will not solve all of your problems. It couldn't even if it wanted to. It's a fantastic dream that can never come true.

This doesn't mean everything is bleak and horrible and hopeless. It just means that approaching it in terms of you and the things you want to get cannot possibly work. It can't work precisely because thinking of things in terms of you and what you want to get is exactly the thing that blocks it.

The attitude expressed in Mr. Chopra's tweet sits right at the very epicenter of where things have gone wrong for mankind. It is the source of all of our troubles. The solution to what's wrong in the world is not some distant dream of pure awareness. It's the understanding that what exists right now is pure awareness, is God, whether you know it or not. We, who seek to know it and possess it, are the very thing that makes it so hard to understand that.

A couple of blogs ago Broken Yogi made a comment that, "Brad is mixing categories. I can't pole vault 18 feet like a top Olympic
athlete, but I doubt that athlete would call me physically ill because I
can't do that... Likewise, I'm not enlightened, but I'm not spiritually lame either."

In response I said something like, "Enlightenment (I hate that word) isn't like pole vaulting 18 feet. It's
more like walking to the bathroom, if we were to continue that analogy.
Most people, instead of walking to the bathroom, which (let's say) just
happens to be 18 feet away instead try to pole vault to the bathroom.
And they can't do it because the ceiling is too low. Yet they try anyway
and keep injuring themselves. The pole keeps breaking, they keep
hitting their heads, they keep beating themselves up over not being able
to do it, and they still have to pee. The only thing an
enlightened person (I hate that term) does differently is that she walks
straight to the bathroom, does her business and then goes back to bed."

Enlightenment or pure awareness or God or whatever isn't some complicated thing we have to chase after far, far away. It's the chasing itself that gets in our way. We wear ourselves out running in circles to try to arrive at the place we already are.

Wednesday, May 09, 2012

This is an excerpt from an interview conducted by Jan Becker at Against The Stream, Noah Levine's place on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles.

Goalless practice is a koan. All the thinking mind can do with the idea is create an endless feedback loop. The goal of the practice is to have no goal, but "having no goal" is also a goal, so how can I have a goal that's no goal, but how can I have goalless practice without knowing that the goal of practice is to be without a goal...? And on and on and on.

Trust me, kids, I've been down this loop a bazillion times. There is no way out of it. Nothing your rational brain can come up with can ever break out of this box.

The only solution is to step completely aside. Allow your goals to be as they are and press on. Leave your goal seeking mind yammering away the way it always does and just sit with that.

Saying the rational brain can't break the loop does not mean that you have to go into irrationality or become illogical. The goalless state is very rational in the sense that it is very orderly and serene. But the rational part of the brain cannot grasp it. That's just the way it is.

Tuesday, May 08, 2012

I didn't hear about Adam Yauch (aka MCA) of the Beastie Boys' death until a day or maybe two after it happened. But I was really sorry to hear that he'd passed away. I hope he made it to whatever bardo he was aiming for. Personally, if I were a Tibetan Buddhist, I'd aim for the Bridgette Bardo!

Ar! Ar! Ar!!

The fact that Adam Yauch was a Buddhist is something that has been brought to my attention by well-meaning people for years now. "Do you know the guy from the Beastie Boys is a Buddhist?" they'd say. Yes. As a matter of fact, I do. Thank you. Now that he was a Buddhist instead of is a Buddhist, I suppose I'll keep hearing it, but phrased in past tense. Which is fine. I don't mind. It's just kind of funny what little Buddhist factoids get pointed out to me repeatedly.

I was never a huge Beastie Boys fan. I liked them. But I never followed their career or bought any of their records except for the greatest hits compilation Sounds of Science. And even that I bought used years after it came out.

I was pretty excited, though, when they came out with their Japanese monster movie inspired video for the song Intergalactic. I can even tell you where exactly they got some of the ideas. The scene where you see the monster's foot crash through a miniature building from the inside is from something Tsuburaya Productions did a lot beginning around the time of the Ultraman Taro TV series in 1973-74. The octopus head monster appears to be inspired by Emperor Guillotine from Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot (by Toei, not Tsuburaya Pro). I was working for Tsuburaya at the time the video came out and tried desperately to get our management to understand what that meant for us and how we might capitalize on it. But to no avail.

I know that Adam Yauch put his Buddhist faith in song in a tune called Boddhisattva Vow. But I never thought that was one of their best. It was too self-conscious and obvious for me. Not that I think it's a bad sentiment or anything. It just lacked any subtlety and it wasn't even a very catchy piece of music. Fight for Your Right to Party was a lot more fun.

When Fight for Your Right to Party came out I remember thinking, "Wow! These guys stole the Beastie Boys' name!" Because I was aware of a NYC based hardcore band called the Beastie Boys from a couple years before that. At the time it didn't occur to me that it could possibly be the same guys. What self-respecting hardcore band would do a song like that? Then I found out it was the same guys and I got the idea that the song was a joke. Once you know that it's hilarious.

I don't know much about Adam Yauch. But it seems like he saw some of the same things in punkrock that I did and saw the connections between punk and Buddhism. In that sense we shared something. And he was the bass player for the Beastie Boys when they played their own instruments.

A little before Adam Yauch died, Howard Hutchings of the Kent, Ohio band Hyper As Hell died. We (Zero Defex) played a tribute show in his memory last Saturday. Howard, Adam Yauch and I were all born the same year, so it was a reminder to me that we all are gonna pass away one of these days. But Nishijima Roshi said, well into his 80s, that he was always happy to wake up each morning one notice, "Wow! I'm still alive!" Crum the Cat always checks on me in the mornings to make sure I'm still alive to feed him by biting my toes.

In the comments section Matt from Houston
said...

Brad: the thing is that to a lot of people a little younger than you,
MCA demonstrated very publicly that you could be a dope musician, be
irreverent, use naughty words, love punk and hip hop and still be a
committed Buddhist focused on doing lots of right in the world. I know
that that's old news to you (and, to some extent, the Brad Warner®
Brand), but it was a pretty important revelation to a lot of us kids.

He
also demonstrated very publicly that you have no obligation to be the
asshole you were when you were a 20-year-old asshole. I know that
without his example my mind might not have opened to the Dharma. So
there are a bunch of us who owe the dude some gratitude...AND THAT'S
RIIIIIIIGHT.

Saturday, May 05, 2012

First off, tonight May 5, 2012, Zero Defex is playing at the Stone Tavern, 110 E. Main St, Kent, Ohio. There are six bands on the bill and the show starts at nine pm. So go!

Anonymous in the comments section of my previous post said:The serious question then - does being enlightened give you any insight - from a theoretical perspective, not how to fix it - or what mental illness is? Or more broadly, do eastern spiritual leaders have something to say about this more than similar edicts about booze or sex?

This is a very good question. It's also an important one because a lot of people assume that an "enlightened" eastern spiritual master does have that kind of insight and are willing to follow their advise on the subject.

I can't answer for all spiritual masters. And I don't want to get into what it might mean to "master" any given form of spirituality. Nor do I even want to poke at what the term "enlightened" means right now. But still, I can answer for myself based on my experience. And I honestly feel that my experience is universal for others in my position.

Anyway. What insight do I have into what mental illness is?

I feel like I understand what that thing we label "mental illness" is in ways that neither I nor anyone else could possibly understand without decades of meditation. But that doesn't mean I know how to treat it or cure it or even deal with it when it confronts me on the street. That is an entirely different sort of problem.

One thing I understand is that the condition we call "normal" also probably ought to be labeled "mental illness." And I expect that in the future this will become clear. People will look back at us in the early 21st century and marvel at the fact that almost the entire world was what they will call "mentally ill." Though perhaps their term for it will be different.

I feel that when we call someone "mentally ill" all we're really saying most of the time is that the person in question is unable to function in what we call "normal society." Of course there are different degrees of this. If a person's inability to function creates a danger to society, society has a right and duty to protect itself from that person. If that person isn't dangerous but is unable to look after himself, that's another matter. There are millions of degrees to the problem of mental illness. But at its core it's still the same problem.

One important thing to bear in mind is that none of us can deal with "normal society" all the time. I know I sure can't. Some people solve this problem by inventing sub-societies that protect them from the larger society, yet still manage to function with it. A monastery would be an example of one such place. It's a place of shelter from the wider more pervasive mental illness, a place one hopes is a bit less mentally ill. But even the best of these still have their own sorts of dysfunctions.

When I was at Tassajara last year there was one day when I simply had to hide in my room for about 24 hours because I could not deal with the relatively sane sub-society I had voluntarily committed myself to. I told people I was sick. But I wasn't. This sort of thing happens all the time. Nearly everyone who goes to a monastery — even a good one — has this happen at some point.

The easy answer that Anonymous is looking for is that all mental illness comes from a mistaken identification of the ego as one's true and fundamental self. But that's such a cliché I wonder if it has any value at all anymore. Be that as it may, it's true that nearly everyone identifies her ego as her true self. But I think most people, whether they know it or not, have some basic intuition that this is not really the way it is. To the extent that they can put this false sense of identity aside, they can function with others and form a reasonable society.

An insight into the deeper origin of mental illness doesn't help a person be able to treat mental illness. This is because even if I understand that you are stuck in believing that your ego-structure is really you, I do not know the details of the stories that you tell yourself and I do not know the extent to which you are prepared to go to defend the false reality you believe in. Some people will kill to defend theirs. I like to stay well clear of those people.

One may, in fact, believe in their own ego-self so deeply that their belief has caused the very chemical structure of their brain and body to be altered to the extent that it's impossible to function in "normal" society without the help of chemicals. It may go so deep that one seems to have been born with this condition. Or that one seems to have had events in one's past that forced this upon the person. This doesn't mean their past is unreal nor the bad things that were done to them were unreal in the conventional sense.

Remember you're reading the words of a Buddhist who believes that even normal conventional notions of what constitutes reality are false. That's an important point. It's the position a lot of the supposedly more enlightened spiritual masters often are too "enlightened" to really understand or convey clearly.

And I am using the word "belief" in a way most people don't. There are aspects of life that are related to what we commonly call "belief" or "habit" that go much much deeper than the way we usually think belief and habit operate.

Also, we all have the same problem. The habit of falsely identifying with the ego self doesn't simply vanish just because you've noticed you're doing it. Noticing this habit is just the first step. But since most people don't even get to this first step, it's a significant one.

So yes, from a theoretical perspective many eastern spiritual masters or leaders or whatever may have some insight into the origin of mental illness. But merely explaining what that insight is may be deeply problematic. Because even mental health professionals are mentally ill in the sense that they are what we falsely call "normal." They're not, by and large, ready to even understand what these eastern spiritual guys are talking about, let alone put it into practice. They haven't done enough meditation to be able to grasp what's being talked about.

But that's OK. It's their job to try and deal with the concrete problems of mental illness. It's just that when these folks talk about mindfulness or even meditation many of them don't really get what they're dealing with. For one thing, they tend to seriously underestimate the real power of this stuff. They often seem to think it's just a way to make you calm down a little.

Here's a photo to show you what I had to deal with while writing this. Crum knows he's being obnoxiously cute. I'm sure of it.

Wednesday, May 02, 2012

But it's not all positives! Oh no! Gempo Roshi has lashed out against the audiobook in this new video:

Also, Zero Defex has been hard at work on a video shoot. Here's a still from what we did on Monday at Wadsworth High School (of all places).

We'll be playing in Kent, Ohio this Saturday May 5th, 2012 at the Stone Tavern 110 E. Main St. in Kent. The show starts at 9. We go on later than that, though. Come and see Mick Hurray's head float through the air!

I got an interesting email the other day that went like this:

I read Hardcore Zen when I
was in college about 8 years ago, thought it was pretty excellent and
then promptly forgot about it. In between my mind exploded, I was
diagnosed with probably every major mental illness that existed and I've
been drugged to the gills by people who think they are 'helping'. I
heard voices and still do occasionally.

The only thing besides a
really incredible wife that has really helped me not put a bullet in my
head is meditation and Buddhism, even though I hate almost everyone and
everything that surrounds it. After losing my mind a few times, I
remembered reading somewhere something to the effect of "I don't
understand why people that hear voices listen to them. I'd tell them to
fuck off and get a body". And for a long time, I thought, whoever this
guy is a total fucking asshole who has no idea what he's talking about.
It's about as funny as a dead baby joke to someone who actually has a
dead baby., It's bad advice, too.

So a few days ago I'm in a hippy-dippy used bookstore and I found your book
and read it again. And it resonated with me much more than it had 8
years ago, it's a fantastic book and it's wonderful to hear someone
else's frustrations with the bullshit that surrounds Buddhism. And then
I found the quote that had stuck with me so long - in your book - and
it sort of reflected everything else about Buddhism - that most people
in these communities don't know shit about mental illness, they're just
terrified of it and want to get away from it.

Why am I telling
you this? Not to pin the blame on you over one fucking sentence in a
book you wrote years ago and not because I believe you are intentionally
perpetuating this prejudice. Because if you consider yourself a
teacher, I want to tell you that statements like these, while funny and
true, cut deep. They drive away people like me that need to know
reality and need to know they aren't alone at the same time that many
mental-health practitioners are pushing shitty drugs and Orwellian
doublespeak under the banner of mindfulness.

This is how I replied:I just recorded the audiobook version of Hardcore Zen and when I came to that
line I wanted to change it. This was before I even read your email. But
I left it in because I feel really strongly that people who change
works of art suck. Like George Lucas did with Star Wars. Ugh!

The reason I wanted to change it is that I'm now a lot more aware of the realities of mental illness than
I was in 2003. So I realize now that joke is not really very good. On the
other hand, it's an honest statement of what I thought at the time. I
feel like that's often useful even when it's wrong. Does that make
sense? If people are put off by that statement, maybe they should be. It
shows that I don't have all the answers and people ought to know that.

Anyway, I know now it's not as easy as what I wrote. I think I knew
it at the time too. I think possibly what I was getting at was the
Buddhist notion that you have to learn not to believe your own bullshit.
Not everyone hears actual disembodied voices. But everyone tells
themselves things & then believes those things. We all need to learn
to tell ourselves to fuck off.

The issue of meditation and mental illness is really complex, especially these days. Traditionally, Buddhists have almost always touted meditation as a better treatment for mental illness than the standard medical methods. For example, somewhere in Shobogenzo Dogen gives a list of advice for practitioners. One of these is, "Don't take medicine for mental illness."

Of course the medicines prescribed for mental illness in Dogen's time (13th century CE Japan) were not like the ones we have today. It's hard to even imagine what he might have been referring to. Nor was mental illness understood in the way we understand it today. Which isn't to say we have a complete understanding of it even now. But I think it's safe to say our understanding of metal illness today is objectively better than it was in Dogen's time.

Even so, these days a lot of meditation teachers still insist that meditation is a better treatment for mental illness than drugs. I tend to agree somewhat but only with some very significant reservations. I think ultimately, in the very long term, if one is extremely committed to meditation practice, with an exceedingly patient and loyal teacher, that meditation is probably a better way to go. But I think it's extremely rare for all these conditions to come together. For example, I don't think I could be patient enough to deal with a student who was seriously mentally ill no matter how dedicated he was. It also depends on the severity of the illness in question. These days medication for mental illness is prescribed for a lot of people who really don't need it. That's a whole debate in itself, which I'm not going to get into.

There are a lot of people who really need these medications just to have any semblance of a normal life. There are a lot of people who might benefit from meditation, but who will not dedicate themselves to it enough for it to be really effective. In the real world it isn't always possible to establish ideal conditions.

It's kind of like dieting and exercise. I think it's pretty clear that the best, most natural, least complicated way to slim down is through diet and exercise. But it's a very different thing for someone who is twenty pounds overweight than it is for someone who is three-hundred pounds overweight. Somebody who weighs 450 pounds might die before diet and exercise could have a significant effect — even though he can take off twenty pounds through diet and exercise just like a slimmer person. He may therefore need something more drastic. Meditation and mental illness work something like that. But this is still a very incomplete metaphor.

*****

In case people don't get the joke with the video above, I was referencing a series called Ask Roshi. You can find several examples on YouTube. There's one about The Law of Attraction in which Genpo tries to draw in fans of The Secret. There's one on Why We Suffer in which Genpo identifies himself on screen as a "Zen Master." Like I've said before, anyone who would use such a term except as a joke doesn't have a single clue what Zen is about. These videos each have well over 10,000 views.

It's really warped what the general public thinks is significant and serious in terms of Zen or meditation in general. I aim to spend the next couple years doing some significant damage to this bullshit.